Last night, I bumped into Justin Bieber just seconds prior to his VMA performance of “Baby.” Just twenty-four hours later, my own baby was back in my arms.

This year's awards marked my first prolonged absence from Maggie since she was born. I was in Los Angeles just five nights, but the days were jam-packed and long.

In the fifteen years I've been here, MTV News' purview has grown by leaps and bounds. I now have a hand in all of it, from the hundreds of articles, blogs and video segments produced for the website to the 200, ...

All the way from JFK to LAX (the part I was awake, anyway), all I could hear was the voice of Ryan Adams screaming in my ears.

"Don't waste my time; this is it! This is really happening!!! This is really happening!!!"

My brain was on the right lyric, but the alt-country singer/songwriter's seminal 2003 single, "This Is It," was the wrong track. This week, anyway, Michael Jackson owns the phrase. Hence my 5,922-mile, 34-hour trip to the red carpet premiere of "Michael Jackson: This Is It."

For at least a day now (it's been tough to keep track, frankly; the last few have been punctuated by black holes where my memory used to be), my email inbox has been slammed by a steady flow of identical, potentially editorially-salient spam comments: Buy Valium.

For my mother, whose graduation from Columbus High School had been celebrated with a then-unheard of trip to New York, Radio City Music Hall was a white-gloved, hi-balled Mecca, thousands of miles in every way from Waterloo, Iowa. I must've been about twelve-years-old when she ...

Sadly, breaking news doesn't surprises me much anymore. It is immediately what it is.

I was in a seventeenth floor corner office overlooking Times Square on a conference call with a blogger from VH1's Best Week Ever (of all media entities) when I heard the news.

"Michael Jackson had a heart attack."

Now, I was never a huge fan, but I remember the first time I heard "Thriller." I was sitting on my cousin Jimmy's bed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, wearing big, puffy headphones when I first heard Vincent Price's sinister cackle. A few months ...

Forget the speech I gave when I ran for student council president, that night I performed in front of five thousand Iowa State Fairgoers, or even my wedding day; I hadn't experienced pressure until I've been locked into a 6 x 12 foot trailer with ten colleagues, 66 monitors, and two and a half hours of live television.

There was something oddly normal about standing there in the shadow of The Kodak Theater tonight as Hollywood's most-celebrated walked Oscar red carpet.

Maybe it was the light; the typically sun-dappled, Technicolor California sky was choked with clouds. Maybe it was that I've done a few of these before (see also Grammys, VMAs, etc). Or maybe it was optical fatigue; I mean, we've all seen a few million red carpets on E!, right?

Either way, I was wound pretty tightly as Josh Horowitz and I pulled into the press parking lot on Sunset & ...

Of course, truth is that I walked the carpet (which was Heineken green, as I recall) well in advance of the actual celebrities. The rest of the night, I was working across the street in a corrugated aluminum trailer.

We have a small crew at The Staples Center tonight. Most of us, however, are working from our Times Square newsroom. Which is just fine with me. Because it may be a late night, but at least it ends at home with Abbi.